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Abandoning the battlefield for an isolated life on the Spanish coast, war photographer Andrés Faulques spends his time painting murals containing images of human conflict, until his solitude is interrupted by a man whose life had been altered forever by one of Faulques' images.

Abstract:

Abandoning the battlefield for an isolated life on the Spanish coast, war photographer Andrés Faulques spends his time painting murals containing images of human conflict, until his solitude is interrupted by a man whose life had been altered forever by one of Faulques' images.

Meditation on war as order and chaos, ELC review

I enjoyed this book, though it has its problems. On the one hand, it spends time philosophically pondering the meaning of life and human nature, especially from the perspective of trying to make sense of war. If you like that contemplation, then you might like the book. If you want a ...Read more...

I enjoyed this book, though it has its problems. On the one hand, it spends time philosophically pondering the meaning of life and human nature, especially from the perspective of trying to make sense of war. If you like that contemplation, then you might like the book. If you want a thriller, this is not your book. The overarching plot is mostly a discussion between two characters which leads the protagonist to digress into episodes of his past. On the other hand, it can be a bit melodramatic, and one could argue that some characters, especially female characters, lack depth.

The book dwells on a very bleak perspective of human nature, focusing on the propensity for war and atrocity. The book emphasized that no one is innocent. The protagonist uses the concept of chaos theory, a theory where all our non-linear interactions have the potential to be amplified, even the actions of apparent by-standers. But the protagonist only uses the popularization of chaos theory, not the actual mathematical physics. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, where the act of observation changes the thing observed, is also alluded to in the discussions of the role of the photographer in war.

The book's main character is Faulques, a war photographer who has given up photography. He has purchased an old lighthouse and is painting a huge mural of war in the circular walls inside. His lover, Olvido, had been killed in a warzone a few years earlier. Faulques is visited by Ivo Markovic, a former soldier from Croatia. Ivo had been the subject of one of Faulques's most famous photos, and that photo led to the murder of Ivo's wife and child. Ivo calmly explains that he wants to have a long talk with Faulques, and then he will kill him.

Over about a week's time, Ivo comes to visit Faulques and watch him paint. They talk about the nature of war, the nature of human beings, the morality of photography. Between their discussions, Faulques thinks back over his life, especially his relationship with Olvido. She is a topic he avoids with Ivo, and Ivo knows it.

Faulques decides after Olvido's death to abandon photography. He has tried through artistic composition to show the deeper order of the universe in the chaos of war. He takes up painting because he feels that photography can not capture all that was possible to say about war within the scheme of the universe. Ivo had originally seen Faulques as an evil person, who enjoyed his life while he was creating tragedy for others, but Faulques gradually teaches Ivo that he did not enjoy the suffering he recorded or that he might cause by his work, that he carries the burden of culpability for his role in war. Ivo helps Faulques confront the loss of Olvido.

The character of Olvido is a weak part of the book. She is not well-rounded, and could be seen as a projection of the male author's wet-dream fantasies. Or maybe her role is to help the book sales. But even she has some depth, as she becomes obsessed with the cost of war, photographing the detritus. A former fashion model, she will not photograph people, because she hates being photographed herself.

One aspect that improves one's appreciation of the book is the question of whether Ivo is a real person. At the end of the book, he seems to disappear. He seems to have a role like Death coming to take Faulques away. Or Ivo could have been a projection of Faulques' own troubled conscience. This possible interpretation makes up for the fact that Ivo speaks with too much sophistication for a poorly educated foot soldier.

Another aspect of the narrative that improves it is the frequent discussion of visual aesthetics. Faulques discusses and meditates on the nature of photography versus painting and how each of them can capture part of the essential aspect of war. But here too, the book seems to devolve into name dropping, where the author proves he has done his art history homework.

The audio book was well-produced.

Evolutionary Literary Criticism

Because I have been reading evolutionary literary criticism, it has occurred to me that I should be trying to apply it at every turn. So here is my attempt with Painter of Battles.

Evolutionary Literary Theory Boilerplate

For theory, I will be drawing primarily on the collection "The Literary Animal" (abbreviated below as TLA) edited by Gottschall, and Gottschall's own book, "The Storytelling Animal" (TSA). One problem with offering an evolutionary interpretation of the text is that there are three different versions of evolutionary literary criticism (ELC). The first (ELC1) simply observes that humans are fascinated by stories featuring survival, social status, and mating themes (boy loses girl, maiden guarded by dragon, boy hangs from cliff, etc.). In TLA, this line is promoted by McEwan, Nettle, Carroll, Nordlund, Fox, Gottschall himself, Kruger, and Salmon.

The second version (ELC2) is to emphasize that storytelling itself is an adaptation, and that humans are wired to enjoy and transmit stories. In TLA, this position is presented by Boyd and Sugiyama, and it is the thesis of Gottschall's own book, TSA. ELC2 also allows one to explore the degree to which the author intentionally (or perhaps unintentionally) tries to conform to or challenge the expectations of a genre. In other words, how good of a job did the author do telling the tale, and how was it received by the readers or listeners?

The third version (ELC3) is that stories have been a method of storing cultural information throughout human history, and as such, they preserve cultural entities and allow for cultural evolution. Stories here include religious texts and political histories. This position is argued by David Sloan Wilson's essay in TLA and by Gottschall in TSA to a limited degree. Wilson's position is partially related to version one, in that he says that human nature is not infinitely flexible, and texts that stray too far from evolutionarily interesting themes will fail to be embraced and retold. But Wilson's position also allows for a sort of historicism or ideological critique, in which the subtext of a narrative or of its reception might be to support the current cultural status quo or to advocate for a different cultural state. So the cultural meaning of a text might be quite different from what the author had in mind when it was written. Culturally powerful elements may promote a story that justifies their own hegemony.

ELC3 should also encompass the use of a storytelling tradition to indicate group membership. Knowledge of a canon of stories, or the proper form of a storytelling genre, can act as the sign of worthiness for membership as much as any other demonstration of mastery of a behavior or belief system. Reading Joyce's Ulysses may not keep you riveted at the edge of your seat turning the pages (ELC2), and it may not recount the harrowing adventures of survival or the boy getting the girl (ELC1), but having read the book might indicate the membership of the reader within a social class. It indicates both the ability to perform the task and the value system of the group. To be knowledgable about the details of a large canon of stories, whether it is Proust's In Search of Lost Time or the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you must first have the ability and free time to learn those details, and you must also have the inner motivation to learn them, a motivation often achieved by belonging to a group that considers them worth knowing. Establishing one's worthiness for membership in any group potentially allows one to share in the tangible benefits of the group (resources, social hierarchy, etc.), whether or not one is consciously aware of such benefits. For example, the shipwrecked Odysseus was treated as noble because he demonstrated mastery of a particular behavior—an aristocratic form of address.

Perez Reverte via ELC1

Painter of Battles is clearly a story well populated with topics relevant to evolutionary fitness. War is a violent struggle for survival, in which some live and some die. Darwin and others used war as a metaphor to describe evolutionary competition. Some evolutionary thinkers have argued that the advantage of real war is that the victors have greater reproductive success, through both pillage and rape. So humans should have a disproportionate interest in stories that feature the life-and-death struggles of war.

Olvido is an attractive woman who is bored with the superficiality of the glamorous world of fashion photography, which she sees as false. She teaches Faulques how to turn his photography into art, how to give the chaos of war the orderliness necessary to make it beautiful. She gives his raw meaning a form of beauty, and he gives her beautiful form an inner reality. That having been said, we are attracted to stories of beautiful women. In terms of evolution, she proves her high status not only through her youth and beauty but through her knowledge of form and her wisdom that high culture is superficial.

Through his daring and his casual sophistication (he knows her pearls are real), he proves his high status to her. Despite the explicit comparison of Olvita to the goddess Diana, she wants to have a child by Faulques, but before she can convince him to accept, she dies. So the story has the tragic pull of the evolutionary happy ending gone bad. The main time frame of the novel, with Faulques painting the mural, is a process of him mourning her loss. Ivo for his part mourns his own lost wife and child. Through their discussions, Ivo discovers the eternal pattern and recurrence of war, and Faulques reveals that the objective photographer is still an accomplice and that he shares in the guilt for Olvido's death.

Perez Reverte via ELC2

ELC2 deals with the human need to experience narratives. In this text, I see it being worked out by way of the need for visual representation. Faulques is obsessed with discovering an orderliness beneath the chaos, a visual resolution within the violent details. By each man telling his story to the other, he recasts his own life story into a better narrative. As to the second point: the narrative struggles to to be a well-told tale. The plot can feel stagey in a bad way. It has tension: Ivo really does begin by wanting to kill this evil photographer. Faulques begins their confrontation by thinking about how to escape Ivo or kill him first, but then he even passes up the chance to report Ivo to the police. Ivo is almost like the figure of Death in a medieval tale or a Bergman film. The digressions into Faulques's past are gripping tales of how humans deal with cruelty, both with courage and despair, but the overarching structure is not as compelling as other narratives.

Authors can try to aim their work at two different audiences: the high-brow audience that expects to be challenged, and the lower-brow reader who wants more straightforward entertainment. Shakespeare successfully aimed his work at both audiences at once. This work seems to aim at both, but it doesn't fully succeed in either. The book has too many aspects of commercial appeal, like the hot girlfriend, for acceptance among the high-brow, and too much ponderous discussion of human nature for the reader looking for a page-turner.

Perez Reverte via ELC3

ELC3 deals with what cultural significance the narrative has in terms of group selection and cultural evolution. In this regard, the story presents war as an objectified thing, as opposed to a means by which one force tries to impose its will on an opposing group of people. War is seen as tragic, but real and unescapable. This is a story for those who seek out peaceful solutions rather than victory for our (naturally righteous) side. Faulques never accepts one side of the violence. He looks at it unflinchingly. But he is a representative of wealthy western Europe. It is forces in those poorer, more desperate places that engage in war. In his mural, there are medieval knights fighting under modern skyscrapers. The narrative takes the reader beyond both a simplistic support of war and a simplistic support of non-violence. Faulques argues that humans are cruel by nature, and that cruelty is bound to intelligence. So the cultural significance is as a protest against war, but one that recognizes its deep connection to fundamental human nature.

"Abandoning the battlefield for an isolated life on the Spanish coast, war photographer Andrés Faulques spends his time painting murals containing images of human conflict, until his solitude is interrupted by a man whose life had been altered forever by one of Faulques' images."@en